AppFresh helps you to keep all applications, widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up to date. All from one place, easy to use and fully integrated into Mac OS X. It provides a central place to control the software updates available to your Mac, integrating most popular and most common update checking technologies such as Apple Software Update, Sparkle, Microsoft AutoUpdate and osx.iusethis.com. We want you to spend your time using your applications, not keeping them up to date!

AppFresh not only gets update information from iusethis.com. If you have an user profile at iusethis.com you can manage it from within AppFresh and control which applicationsit contains, even automatically. Using your iusethis profile also enables you to install applications you don't have on your computer. This comes in handy when you need to reinstall your computer and want your basic set of applications installed. Using AppFresh and an up to date iusethis profile makes this an easy task.

Currently, there is an issue related to Microsoft AutoUpdate 2 (shipped wit MS Office 2008) that, if installed, keeps AppFresh from working properly. If you have that installed and AppFresh keeps crashing, please try âdefaults write de.metaquark.appfresh IUEnableMicrosoftAutoUpdate FALSEâ in your console and start AppFresh. A fix will be released soon.

Great job on the 0.6 update - the performance and stability both took a major step forward with this new release! I've been using AppFresh for about six months now and find it to be an indispensable tool for keeping track of the 180 (and growing) applications in my Mac arsenal. Many thanks!

@geotaylor : We're not aware of any occasion where AppFresh would crash the whole system. Could you please email us at [email protected] and describe what was going on in more detail? If you have a crash log or anything else that's more precise than BOOM CRASH REBOOT, please also attach it.

zxspectrum: We're aware of that. That's why we're calling it a development preview and only let you opt-in on automatically replacing software. Software naming, packaging and version numbering is something where only very few common practices exist and correctly dealing with everything that floats around is not an easy task.

simonjm: Arne already correctly stated the relationship between AppFresh and iusethis. It's true that we let users register AppFresh as used with their iusethis account as soon as they enter their account information (an optional step). This doesn't lead to wrong data, since the user is obviously using AppFresh, but it puts AppFresh in a position where you can't compare its use count to other apps' use counts. Also, we have great interest in up-to-date version information on iusethis too, and we're working with Arne and Marcus to improve the situation. For example, you can use the version reporter tool in AppFresh to report a more recent version (which is not directly inserted, though, to prevent fraudulent submissions).

Hi Simonjm, AppFresh is not an application made by Marcus or me, but by the people at Metaquark. AppFresh just use iusethis data to track app updates. It also let users manage their iusethis account, meaning that almost all AppFresh users registers AppFresh as an app that they use. In relations to all mac-users, AppFresh's user numbers are artificially high, but for the mac-users that use iusethis, I would say that it is quite accurate.

On how we handle versions; it is one of our greatest challenges, and something that we will find a better solution to.

I'm highly skeptical that the number of users of this software is as stated! Would iusethis.com really artificially inflate the popularity of its own product so it appears more popular??? At any rate, I really enjoy the iusethis website for what it is but the currency of its version numbers is not one of its strengths!